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Troia

Ruined Troy lay promiscuous among findspot and tell, breastworks and ditcheslike nine gold bracelets at a Turkish wedding, in twenty-two karats, mined outside Pergamum.Schliemann’s trench was a wound through the whole thing: at the Scaean Gate he was off by twelve hundred years,

where the mourning doves sang compulsively, vulgar-throated. In the music’s pausenear two stone griffins, a feral tabby warmed herself on a broken plinth, almond blossommade a blizzard in the orchard nearby, and the spokes of wild fennel crossed with the sun’s rays.

The Scamander River was nowhere to be seen, having wandered off acrossthe rich alluvial plain. Nothing more would happen, that was the spirit and the sum:nothing would happen here ever again— that, a taste of fennel, and the goat bells’ tinnitus.